‘Knock at the Cabin’ film twists the home invasion horror

It being mid-winter (typically a doldrums in movie theaters), it’s a cozy relief to be able to throw open the door and find M. Night Shyamalan standing there with his nearannual helping of high-concept thriller. His last one, “Old,” about vacationers trapped on a private beach where aging is accelerated — a kind of highspeed “White Lotus” — fittingly arrived in the summer. But this quieter, gloomier time of year seems perfectly designed for Shyamalan to burst in with his signature brand of big-screen bonkers and some new twists to the age-old question of “Who’s there?”

“Knock at the Cabin,” which opens in theaters Friday, is at once like every previous Shyamalan film and a thrilling departure. Gimmicky set-up? Check. Queasy spiritualism? You bet. But as a self-contained, handsomely staged thriller — after the knocking, the film takes place almost entirely within a remote cabin — Shyamalan’s latest finds the filmmaker working in an appealingly straightforward and stripped-down fashion.

We have our cabin, our small cast of characters and, above all, our preposterous premise. Though Shyamalan’s films often flirt with higher powers and existential conundrums, nothing reigns in his movie universe more than The Concept. And in the gripping “Knock at the Cabin,” he carefully teases it, exploits it and dutifully follows it to its ultimate conclusion with the command of a seasoned professional.

The performances, all around, are convincing, and Shyamalan arrestingly stages the intense standoff as blood begins to spill and calamities, seen on television, mount.

There are, undoubtedly, deeper avenues of exploration left unexamined. But there are also B-movie pleasures that deviate from horror convention, and even some of the director’s own trademark sensibilities. Shyamalan doesn’t pump up the violence, nor does he rely on plot twists to carry “Knock at the Cabin” along. Instead, the film works as a brutal, neatly distilled kind of morality play that toys with fatalism, family and climate change allegory.

Universal Pictures via Associated Press From left, Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn and Nikki Amuka-Bird in a scene from “Knock at the Cabin.”